Yeah the problem is, that the programs with most users will definitely get most votes. Audio editing is not so common task, and most of the people haven't heard from Eclipse, so even if they were great programs, they won't be faring well in this vote.

Using some kind of grading combined with the amount of votes would perhaps solve this problem, but I guess it's too late now..

I choose:-OpenOfficePHBs don't know about it. They should and I guarantee you when people see it they'll be impressed.- EclipseShowed this IDE to mid-level managers the other day as part of our processes for choosing an IDE for a new project we are starting. All they kept saying it can do all of this and its what? Free? Are you sure we don't have to pay for something?-GimpWe are already using this and if its good enough for the special effect guy in Hollywood by god its good enough for your average joe shmu

One thing that makes it much easier is the fact that some of the project names are not very good. MoinMoin?

This was the first time I've heard of Subversion and I can appreciate the clever file naming reference, but no PHB will have an app named subversion because I'm sure he'll believe it's already being used.

Those are the only 2 project names that really stand out as being bad.... -B

Gee I thought phpNuke was long dead, I remember submiting patches to fix some trivial errors, (years ago) and the maintainer acted like I had personaly insulted him; next release had the same errors. The postnuke people forked off and have completely rewritten a fairly versital and more secure system. give it a look.

To keep track we ask that you please log in to your O'Reilly Network account. I think this was plenty warning, and if you'd read it carefully you would have relised you were being _politely_ being told that if you don't log in, you can't vote.

Why even give people the illusion that they might be able to vote without having logged on first? It should have put up the login check before serving up the voting screen. In short, the web site "jumped the gun".

Yeah, and where is LimeWire? Sure it doesn't have the numbers like Kazaa, but if you check out their technology they've got some fairly sophisticated protocols and a pretty large open-source support community....

The only closed-source thing it still needs is the CodeWeavers QuickTime plug-in, sadly (AFAIK -- I'd be happy to find I'm wrong on

mplayer and Xine both have Mozilla plug-ins supporting most Internet audio/video. They're not quite as slick as Crossover, and they don't do Shockwave or other Windows plugins, but they can be quite handy.

With that argument, then... Where is Linux? Where is Apache? Some open source applications should be so known that showing them there would be a waste of space.

If I would to choose just by popularity on that list, I would show KDE, gimp and OpenOffice, they are not new and are fairly known, but are between the more known open source applications of that list and won a lot of times awards like in LinuxJournal.

But, in the other hand, I would like to give some light to not so known applications to a wider

If you're dealing with an office worker, OpenOffice and Evolution are good candidates. Home users would like to see XMMS, mplayer, GAIM, and SpamAssassin. Admins would be interested in Tight VNC and SpamAssassin. The creative types would want GIMP and Audacity.

As for the desktop, it might be a good idea to stick with one for all your demonstration boxes (all KDE or all GNOME) but of course mention that alternatives exist.

It would be nice if Slashdot ran this poll. Internet polls like this are not so useful I suppose, but still it would be cool to see how various projects rank out. The three leaders could be the chosen ones.

My choices in the O'Reilly list are Subversion, OpenOffice.org and SpamAssassin. None of these projects have known patent issues or issues with 3rd parties such as MSN, AOL, Yahoo (the related projects such as mplayer and GAIM do an *excellent* job however).

I wanted Slashdot to run the poll as the O'Reilly one needs an account there.
On hindsight, the Slashdot poll would just allow for vote on one project only, whereas I would really like to vote for over 3 projects in the O'Reilly poll. Good set of software projects there.

You are not required to 'publish' your source code - you just have to give it to anyone you have given the binary to, i.e. your investment firm customers. They can do what they want with it of course.... but then they asked you to do it with GPLed Linux in the first place. From the GPL FAQ (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequi reSourcePostedPublic):

'...the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the program's users, under the GPL'

I know it is not a software package (I know the scripts can be downloaded, but let me gat to what I am getting at), but the site provides a home to many of these projects i feel that COMDEX needs to add it as an honorary member of the list.
-Seriv

I thought Slashdotters always say that open source doesn't innovate? All I hear all day from Slashdotters is how open source should stop copying Microsoft and start innovating. And how we suddenly get a story that implies open source *does* innovate?You Slashbots really have a double standard.I'm sure I'll get moderated down to this but that only shows what kind of an anti-open source zealot place Slashdot has become.

I don't think anyone is arguing that in general open source software doesn't innovate

Um no, that's a very common refrain.

Look at Linux, Apache, OpenOffice, KDE, Mozilla...for each of them, there is a pre-existing closed-source project that it can be called a "clone" of.

In fact, when RMS was initially starting [gnu.org] the "Free Software" movement, he explicitally declared they would clone Unix:

Individual programmers can contribute by writing a compatible duplicate of some Unix utility and giving it to me. For most projects, such part-time distributed work would be very hard to coordinate; the independently-written parts would not work together. But for the particular task of replacing Unix, this problem is absent. Most interface specifications are fixed by Unix compatibility. If each contribution works with the rest of Unix, it will probably work with the rest of GNU.

That seminal message suggests that cloning an existing program will be vastly easier than making a new one, because since there's little original thinking involved, the communication needs between distributed developers are much, much smaller.

And, oh my god, the thing Apache cloned is a clone of something else. Of course Apache, OpenOffice, and Mozilla are clones. You need to view websites, edit documents, and serve websites regardless of the operating system.

So, not every project is an innovation. If they were, we'd only have one of any type of application, and no matter how much it sucked we'd be stuck with it. I'd rather see competition. We might be "duplicating effort", but low and behold the power of capitalism is competition. Commun

I think that the distinction on innovation isn't relevant to a design model.

OpenSource is not only a design model, but a business model. It's a business model that says "Money isn't highly important to me". In a capitalist economy, most people's actions are guided by profit, forming a disincentive to release useful innovations under Open Source.

Some recent programs I'd term highly innovative, and which were either successful themselves, or spawned major fields:ICQ, Quake, RealAudio, Fraunhofer MP3, Mac

I nominate SCO's corporate policy: on the basis of dubious reasoning, lay claim to the work of thousands of Open Source programmers, while simultaneously ensuring that if your claims are accepted, you'll kill the Golden Goose in the act of getting your hands on it!

I'm sure we'll all miss SCO (soon), even if you weren't a fan of their thievery there's no denying their contribution to popular culture. Truly an American icon.

IMHO Gimp and Mplayer are most important projects on list.GNOME and KDE are something everyone is talking about, but not really using (you think you use GNOME or KDE? what except *libs or *wm? do you know how large are these projects?). You can say many good things about OpenOffice, but it's similiar to MS Office: huge and slow. BTW Where is Mozilla? Evolution is MS Outlook replacement. Well... MS Office, MSIE, MS Outlook, where the hell is any innovation?No Blender. No games/emulators. No LyX. No X-Chat.

Aieee! Tainted meat KILLED MY SAMURAI! I didn't have a unicorn horn, Amaterasu Omikami (sp?) was mad at me and decided to write me off because he has the morals and manners of a spoiled child, and now I'm dead.

Ulch - that meat was tainted! You feel deathly sick. Do you want your posessions identified?

Having to deal with all flavors of streaming media in my job, no player impresses me more than Mplayer. Is there any media format that Mplayer will not play? It is exactly what I want and nothing else from a media player.

That said, I'm just impressed with this short list. All of these are good options. This really shows how far Linux on the desktop has come. So much so I'm running Linux on my work-issued laptop in a Windows environment now. Many thanks to all the developers who have made this possible.

Yeah, I still use XMMS since it gets the job done, but I'd like to see something better. I've tried Rythmbox, but it seems to screw up on some of the ID3 tags on my files and it can't edit them. I'd like to see a media library app integrate with MusicBrainz, not just for getting info for CD ripping, but also to check the tags on existing music files.

These are all great applications. But why do any of them want to go to COMDEX? COMDEX tends to show off cool new technology like PDAs, video game hardware, and anything flashy. The fanboys won't care about a great email client. I like the idea of these projects getting exposure, but this may not be the best place.

I voted for Evolution, the Gimp, and OpenOffice. I picked them for the marketing potential. These three products have mass-market potential, and COMDEX is a good way to get them in front of people who would otherwise perhaps never know there are alternatives to Exchange/Outlook and MSOffice.

Oh, great, let's send a legally questionable program to COMDEX and get it in the spotlight. MS , Real, Intel and Apple won't care that we ignore the EULA's and strip out dll's from their applications in order to make it work.

Maybe do a dual booth with Mplayer and DeCSS just to really make certain two of our most important desktop apps get removed.

I'm choosing projects that are cross platform, such as Gimp, OpenOffice, and tightVNC.

As important as it may be to move away from Windows, it is just as important to support it and show people what open source can do for them now with no long term investment.

You can't replace the OS until all the Apps are in place and equivilant, and it'll be so much easier to convert people if they are already using popular opensource/free software on their current platform.

i would take gnuCash off that list and put something like Compiere. gnuCash is nice and all but at comdex it would look silly. it would be like taking Amanda there.

same with Xmms, 'wow it looks like just winamplinux has a winamp clone, how cute.'

MoinMoin? twiki blows this project away, you lost me on this nomination.

spamassassin? wont mcafee already have spamassassin there in the form of spamkiller? but seriously... maybe you could toss that into my qmail mix below somehow.

how about showing off snort? or swan interopering with some real world hardware

how about setting up five little machines running qmail and blast a million delivered mail messages between the machines per hour and have a big led bank sign as a counter? then add and import thousands of users dynamically using ldap.

I know I'm also offtopic, but that was one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. Thank you for pointing that out.

Now, to try to venture into the realm of on-topic: A blimp might cause problems in a trade show booth. The show managers are kind of relentless about what gets put where, floating things, etc. I was at one trade show where a customer, located at a "T" intersection on an aisle, used a light projector with custom lenses to project their logo down the aisle carpet. Show management came b

It's the most mature content management system that I have ever come across, built on top of the mature zope application server. I am dismayed at how few people actually know of this project or have used it.

I am in the plone mailing list and I am reading about 50,000 user installations and larger. I have been using it to create a cognitive map of everything I read and it's an incredible tool. In the context of a knowlege base or knowledge sharing in academia or in a company, it makes it easy to decide who

While the desktop makes for better demos, the real strong players are still the enterprise options. These are the tools which will get noticed by CIO-types. I'm talking about apache, samba, sendmail/postfix/exim, jboss, etc.

Yeah... It's the Open Source folks stealing code from the Closed Source products... Uh huh. Um, did you ever stop to think how difficult this would be? In comparison to say a closed source software company freely downloading the source to an open source project and taking a peek under the hood? Hmm... Look at all these nice open source products proudly shipping with SCO OpenServer 5.0.7:

Out of all the folks that I have ever known, those that use MS for an OS have stolen something to put on it, often times the whole OS is stolen. Let me think here if I know of anyone who hasn't,,,, hmm nope. My dad, my wife, random folks met at school, friends, enemies, you name it. It's many times a brag to see how much monies worth and who has most. Crazy though that all that P2P that just works flawlessly with MS. So far as illegal activity among Linux users, I am the only one in my area I know of that e